Dynamic Slot Allocation in IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN Superframe

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new standard proposed to meet the demands of ever growing interest in the medical field. It consists of light weight, energy efficient and robust sensors used for medical applications such as patient and telehealth monitoring. This standard is flexible and outlines multiple basic access protocols; contention based and collision free to meet the quality of service (QoS) challenges. However, IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN is relatively new standard and needs further optimization (specifically at the MAC layer) to enhance the overall performance. This can be addressed by introducing new backoff algorithms for resource allocation and designing an intelligent MAC. A Unique Backoff Algorithm (UBA) has been introduced in this research to resolve these problems. UBA works under a static scenario and requires a controller for backoff assignment which is generally not applicable in WBAN. Non overlapping Backoff Algorithm (NOBA) is presented to address static problems that assign non overlapping Contention Windows (CWs) to different priority nodes. Both the algorithms are compared with the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) algorithm in IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN under static and dynamic scenarios for performance evaluation. Moreover, the Dynamic Slot Allocation (DSA) scheme is presented in this research to exploit every possible space in the superframe. This scheme is compared with standard and Dynamic Phase Allocation (DPA) scheme to analyze the performance gain. IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN also covered non-medical applications such as fitness monitoring, war simulation, home automation and gaming. A motivation to make WBAN application aware is also presented in this research. Lastly, some open research challenges are proposed that can be combined with DSA to enhance the overall efficiency of the IEEE WBAN standard.